Is that the policy in Sweden? That isn't the case in NJ (or in the US generally I believe). Here all newborns get it unless the parents decline. I wonder if its out of an abundance of caution/assumption that many people may not know their Hep B status...

_________________My oven is bigger on the inside, and it produces lots of wibbly wobbly, cake wakey... stuff. - The PoopieB.

_________________If you spit on my food I will blow your forking head off, you filthy shitdog. - MumblesDon't you know that vegan meat is the gateway drug to chicken addiction? Because GMO and trans-fats. - kaerlighed

If only vaccines could make you gay. I always wanted a gay son but so far mine seems to get an awful lot of crushes on girls. Do you think it's too late? Or if I get him all of the rest of his vaccines at once maybe that will be powerful enough to change him?

Is that the policy in Sweden? That isn't the case in NJ (or in the US generally I believe). Here all newborns get it unless the parents decline. I wonder if its out of an abundance of caution/assumption that many people may not know their Hep B status...

Alright, I checked it out more carefully, and the policy is actually that the child gets the vaccine if a) a family member has hep B, b) one or both parents come from a country where many people have hep B, or c) if the kid is in the same daycare group as a child who has hep B. Or of course if there are other reasons to think the risk is increased.

The WHO recommendation is that everyone should have it, and Sweden is not following it because of the low occurence of hep B here, and the cost of vaccinating all babies.

_________________I tend to hook up with people who give me chocolate, but I fail to see how this is a bad thing./tofulish

Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2011 11:51 amPosts: 6025Location: United States of New England

here health insurance pays for the vaccines or people have to pay out of pocket. so that may account for why they try to force it on everyone because the government isnt paying for it (unless you have some sort of government based health insurance)

Y'know, I am super pro-vaccinating. But I was doing a little poking about to see how long the Hep B vaccine is effective for and while they think adults who are vaccinated might be immune for 20+ years, kids who begin the series before 6 months are probably not fully covered past 15. So why the hell did I have my infant immunized against Hep B when she is unlikely to have any risk of contracting it before she'll need to be re-immunized? what the fizzle? This kind of nonsense makes a person start to believe in vaccine company conspiracy theories, or at least that immunizing recommendations might have as much to do with $ than public safety.

If you contract Hep B as a small child, the risk of it turning chronic is much greater. Adults can usually be cured. Hep B is not very common here, so they only vaccinate babies who have carriers in their family.

my midwife explained it as the babies with the highest risk of contracting hep b are also often the least likely to get vaccinated on time or at all as children, so giving it immediately at the hospital covers those high risk groups. which kinda goes for all vaccines, but i guess they have to prioritize some things over others.

we declined the hep b vaccine at birth and the midwife/ped were totally fine with it.

My point is that I know we are all hep b negative and don't have any close contact with anyone positive. The responsible thing would have been to tell us up front what the effectiveness window was for vaxing her as a baby so I could have said we would pass on the entire series. I complete understand the public policy element, but even within public policy there is the reality that I am paying for these vaccines, that they require holding down my kid and causing her pain, and that we are individuals that the policy might not make sense for. I will decline for the next kid, or start the series a few years later, when the length of effectiveness starts improving.

I have a question about vaccination, I dont know if it has been answered or asked before but here it goes, Im currently pregnant with baby number two and we are planning on raising her vegan but in Swedens vaccinationsprogram we have a triple shot that is for rubella, measles and mumbs which is not compleatly vegan, its the part of the vaccine that is for measles that is not vegan and we have had a few breakouts in Sweden recently of the measles and people do still die even in our part of the world from measles, so my question is would you still vaccinate your child with this eventhough its not vegan?

I know some of the vaccines my kids have had are egg-based or something like that, so totally not vegan, but I went ahead and did them anyway. I'd rather have vaccinated kids than sick kids, vegan vaccines or not.

I have a question about vaccination, I dont know if it has been answered or asked before but here it goes, Im currently pregnant with baby number two and we are planning on raising her vegan but in Swedens vaccinationsprogram we have a triple shot that is for rubella, measles and mumbs which is not compleatly vegan, its the part of the vaccine that is for measles that is not vegan and we have had a few breakouts in Sweden recently of the measles and people do still die even in our part of the world from measles, so my question is would you still vaccinate your child with this eventhough its not vegan?

Absolutely, no question about it. Ultimately, we do not yet live in a perfect vegan world and sadly this means that many items will have animal products in and not necessarily have an alternative yet.

You can always ask to see if there is a vegan alternative available yet and to show that there is demand for one, but if there isn't definitely still vaccinate. It's not worth the risk.

_________________"Your mother was a superstitious hamster, and your father smelled of elderberry (right before he died of an untreated infection). Now go away, before we taunt you with your credulous magical thinking a second time!" - Desdemona

Awesome responses, my first thought was to check if there is an alternative vegan vaccination but it seems like there isnt and I also thought that vaccinating would be the best thing to do even if its not totally vegan. But I will defenitely talk to them and say that there is a need for vegan parents and children to have an option about a different type of vegan vaccine.

Yeah, nobody's going to kick you out of the vegan club for vaccinating and looking after the health of your child. :D

annak wrote:

If it were made from the ovaries of a fertile white rhino that might be another matter, but yeah, I'll throw a chicken egg at preventing my kid from getting measles without thinking twice about it.

I was telling me husband the same thing -- if they used the souls of unborn baby unicorns or something, I might feel disgusted, but a chicken egg doesn't really faze me. Better than gelatine and I sometimes (go ahead and revoke my vegan card) take antibiotics for UTIs that come in gel caps -- I tried getting a non-gel cap version once, long ago, because I really don't like gelatine and was given a liquid suspension that made me vomit like cray-cray -- and now we live in the country and our local pharmacy hardly carries anything, so I have to take what I can get. :/ (I still avoid gelatine at all other times, though, and only use vegan vitamins. And I am on prescription medication so rarely -- twice in the last 5 years -- that it is not a huge issue.)

This man makes me sick to my stomach when you think of all the harm he has caused by trying to cash in on parents' fears.

Quote:

[...] Cases of measles rose from 56 in 1998 to nearly 1,400 in 2008. In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person in more than a decade to die of the disease in Britain.

An investigation by journalist Brian Deer found that Wakefield had been paid £435,000 to advise lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR and that he'd given children at his son's birthday party cash in return for blood samples for his research. A subsequent two-and-a-half-year General Medical Council (GMC) hearing concluded in January 2010 that Wakefield was guilty of serious professional misconduct, and that he had acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his research. He had, the panel concluded, subjected 11 children to unwarranted invasive tests such as lumbar punctures and colonoscopies without necessary ethical approval. The Guardian reported at the time that the GMC hearings also found that, before the paper was published, Wakefield had filed a patent as the inventor of a vaccine to eliminate measles and treat inflammatory bowel disease. In May 2010, the GMC struck him off and the Lancet eventually retracted the 1998 paper.

[...] Since that notorious Lancet paper, numerous studies on MMR and autism have failed to find a link. One of those studies, which reviewed the medical records of 500 autistic children born in a specific area of London since 1979, found no difference in MMR vaccination rates between children with autism and those of the general population, and no evidence that children vaccinated with MMR at younger ages developed autism any earlier than children vaccinated later.

Another, published in 2008, found "strong evidence against association of autism with... MMR exposure". According to the US National Institutes of Health, evidence from the UK against an MMR-autism link has been accepted by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These quotations don't even begin to cover the appalling portrayal and treatment of those with autism by Wakefield in his new reality show, but they make me furious because they show how utterly callous he was in deliberately endangering lives just for personal gain.

_________________"Your mother was a superstitious hamster, and your father smelled of elderberry (right before he died of an untreated infection). Now go away, before we taunt you with your credulous magical thinking a second time!" - Desdemona

Awesome responses, my first thought was to check if there is an alternative vegan vaccination but it seems like there isnt and I also thought that vaccinating would be the best thing to do even if its not totally vegan. But I will defenitely talk to them and say that there is a need for vegan parents and children to have an option about a different type of vegan vaccine.

Awesome responses, my first thought was to check if there is an alternative vegan vaccination but it seems like there isnt and I also thought that vaccinating would be the best thing to do even if its not totally vegan. But I will defenitely talk to them and say that there is a need for vegan parents and children to have an option about a different type of vegan vaccine.

There are homeopathic options that are vegan..

Not in the UK. The homeopathic sugar pills which claimed to be vaccines are banned from describing themselves as such for being fundamentally misleading and there being absolutely no scientifc evidence whatsoever that they work. There is no evidence that homeopathic products work beyond the placebo effect, and the suggestion that parents give placebos to their children in place of vaccinations which actually work is pretty irresponsible.

_________________"Your mother was a superstitious hamster, and your father smelled of elderberry (right before he died of an untreated infection). Now go away, before we taunt you with your credulous magical thinking a second time!" - Desdemona

There is no evidence to show that homeopathic medicines can be used instead of vaccination. The Faculty of Homeopathy recommends that immunisation is carried out in the usual way, unless there are strong medical contraindications.

_________________"Your mother was a superstitious hamster, and your father smelled of elderberry (right before he died of an untreated infection). Now go away, before we taunt you with your credulous magical thinking a second time!" - Desdemona